FIRST LIVE AID, AND THEN--THE WORLD

There’s a cerebral mass of brain coral on one corner of Mike Mitchell’s Spartan desk top. Occasionally he picks it up and talks to it, much the same way Hamlet once addressed his old friend poor Yorick.

“When somebody’s getting a little goofy, I make a joke about tearing their brain out,” he said during an interview the other day, hefting the coral in his hand.

Mitchell lost $50,000 producing Live Aid, July’s African charity concert bonanza that has taken in an estimated $50 million (and still tabulating). But he doesn’t complain to his brain coral about it.

He doesn’t dwell on the Live Aid loss. The London-Philadelphia bash cost his television production company about $3.9 million to produce. Even though the show was heavily underwritten by corporate sponsors, neither Mitchell nor any of his staff took any salaries. They couldn’t turn any profit and still stick to their heralded and oft-repeated promise to give every donated cent to feed famine victims in Africa.

So, when Live Aid’s final audit is distributed to the media in October as evidence that it was “squeaky clean,” there will be red ink in the column labeled “Worldwide Sports and Entertainment, Inc., Marina del Rey.”

“None of us took any pay, so in real costs we lost a lot more than $50,000,” he said.

But Mitchell’s already moved on to other, more lucrative projects. He would much rather discuss Marshall McLuhan and McDonald’s hamburgers, the salvation of Western civilization’s soul, Coke as a metaphor for life itself and the very selfish motivation behind most charity . . . almost anything that looks to the future of his company rather than the past .

The gee-whillikers grin rarely fades from his face. He is an ebullient 40-year-old who believes in tight nuclear families and vegetarianism. But this architect of the now-legendary Live Aid broadcast is no euphoric moron who revels in losing money.

On the contrary, the good will that Live Aid bought his company has already made his Worldwide Sports one of the hottest TV production think tanks in the world.

Thus far, proposals for Live Aid encores include an internationally broadcast French fashion show, a six-hour international Christmas show, a massive 24-hour satellite feed commemorating the 40th anniversary of the United Nations, a December telecast salute to Hollywood and a March program showing Americans exactly how their dollars were spent when they contributed to the Live Aid Foundation or bought a copy of USA for Africa’s “We Are the World.”

Even as you’re reading this article, Mitchell is in Moscow to meet with the chief of Soviet television about producing yet another Worldwide program in October.

But these projects are not designed to be loss leaders. Make no mistake about it, they’re intended to cash in on the celebrity that Worldwide Sports attained via Live Aid.

“It’s been obviously good to me,” he said. “I’m the first to stand up and say what it’s given me: a way for the public to see what I am, both as a company and as a person.”

Mitchell lives well. Worldwide’s suite of offices overlooking the Marina City Club yacht harbor are comfortable, if not lavish.

But money, Mitchell insists, is not the point. One gets the sense that he is far more interested in power, influence and history.

“People don’t do things just because of money and just because of land. They accomplish great things because of emotional commitment, regardless of the money. People do things if they think that what they are doing is right.

“That’s the reason American productivity is so bad today. Nobody has a reason to go to work. The only reason to go to work at all is for a little money and money is not that strong a motivator in American life. So our productivity is just average.”

His staff numbers no more than a dozen, but they are expected to work six days a week and lots of overtime . . . not because they must but because they want to. They are happy, fired up and brimming with something Mitchell calls “emotional capital.” If they aren’t, they’re replaced.

Mitchell’s brand of capitalism reduces international politics to three principles:

1--”You have a very fearful world that wants and desperately seeks a sense of brotherhood. Whether its the bomb or whatever, people seek things to reduce that sense of fear.

2--”You have the force of technology now which literally is only four or five years old that can create a sense of internationalism through the media.

3--”And then you have the emergent force of Japan in the last 10 years and still other countries in the past four or five, seeking international markets.”

Worldwide offers a media mega-event service that allows corporations to tap international markets by peddling good will.

“The only tool that has the ability to create a non-threatening, non-boundary-producing sense of family, is the media,” says Mitchell. “If you do programming properly, as we did for Live Aid, the waves just come across with music or visual material.”

What that all adds up to is something beyond mere multinational corporate profit-making. For Mitchell, it spells mega-business: the kind of multimedia advertising and public relations that makes buying network time on the Superbowl seem as primitive as cave painting.

“We’ve all seen (business) change, even though we’re not aware of it. McDonald’s doesn’t sell hamburgers. McDonald’s sells a feeling that the world is good. ‘Come to McDonald’s. It’s good.’ It’s not like the best food or the cheapest food. It is good. The world is good.

“Coke sells you life. Coke is it. Coke is life.”

The principle of moral preferential buying is in its infancy, but it will be the chief topic in corporate board rooms by 1990, according to Mitchell.

“People’s lives, values and pocketbooks are connected. What corporations want now to do is position themselves to show they are good and that they care about the community and the world.”

But what if a toxic-chemical producer or scandal-ridden stock brokerage house comes to Mitchell with a blank check and says: “We want to be perceived as good”?

Worldwide has already had to grapple with that thorny issue, Mitchell said. The question of taking on Union Carbide as a sponsor was once raised. In another instance, Worldwide turned down a lucrative offer from a country whose politics clash with Mitchell’s concept of “goodness.” (He wouldn’t say which country it was, but a good guess might be South Africa.)

One “client” whose image he does intend to shine up is Hollywood.

“There’s a rap on Hollywood over all this crap it puts out. The opposite is exactly the truth.”

From Live Aid and USA for Africa to Bob Hope and Danny Kaye, Hollywood has always had a big heart. In December, Worldwide intends to show its appreciation with a television salute.

“We happen to believe in honoring the significant role of Hollywood as a major and important piece of this city and of the world. Hollywood creates images that absolutely influence the world.”

Also in December, Worldwide is working on a special Christmas eve program that will take live camera crews into the homes of Emperor Hirohito, Queen Elizabeth II, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan--among others. For six hours, viewers in eight countries would see the most mighty wasseling away their various Noels.

“Those families, who hold a kind of fascination for the world anyway, will act as hosts to the world and we’ll create a show around them of great size and grandeur.”

Mr. and Mrs. Gorbachev, for instance, would bounce their grandchildren on their knees, open presents around the fireplace and then introduce a holiday performance by the Bolshoi Ballet.

Besides wrestling with the question of which clients are “good” and which are unacceptable, Mitchell also faces the paradox of being a profit-making company that “sells” charitable causes.

But, Mitchell reasons good naturedly, just what’s wrong with earning a living at the same time you feed the starving or end war?

He began working on that premise two years ago when he was a senior vice president for planning and finance of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. With the financial help of Malaysian oil baron Tatparanandan Ananda Krishnan, Mitchell carried the principle over to his own company when he and Krishnan formed Worldwide after the close of the 1984 Summer Games.

Were boyish but hard-nosed Mitchell not a prime mover behind both Live Aid and the most financially successful Olympic Games of modern times, his hyperbolic gusto might have all the credibility of an Edsel.

But he was right.

Satellites are in place. Consumers all over the globe are ready to plunk down their dinars, lire, rupees and rubles for whatever attractive product a Pepsi, Coke or AT&T; might want to sell. Multinationals are beating a path to Mitchell’s door.

He insists that the real payoff comes when he can line up the right combination of enlightened corporate sponsors, grumpy grudging governments and break-a-leg celebrities to change a billion viewers’ minds about fundamental values.

Maybe that’s how you end the threat of nuclear holocaust and soft-sell world peace.

Worldwide plans a live TV event June 21 that could do just that. It will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the birth of the United Nations and it will make Live Aid look as quaint as a kinescope. All 97 nations on Earth with satellite uplinks will be invited to participate in one 24-hour live show: “One major mix to the world--in some sense, the ultimate television show,” Mitchell effused.

“Live Aid was a Model T. It was like Chuck Yeager going through the sound barrier. Nobody knew it could be done until we tried it.”